One does not typically think of the military as an eco-friendly institution.
Yet that image may be changing. In November 2014, the Pentagon issued a report
that listed global warming as one of the gravest national security threats
facing the United States and outlined several important steps that the
Department of Defense (DoD) was taking to mitigate its effects.[1] Over the last decade, the branches of the US
armed forces have increased their use of alternative energy sources to lessen or
eliminate their reliance on fossil fuels. The French military, too, has
implemented eco-friendly policies through, for example, a recycling program,
pollution mitigation, and making bases safe havens for wildlife. This is not to
say that twenty-first century military forces are wings of Greenpeace or even
advocates of environmentalism, but a growing interaction of environmental and
military historians in academia mirrors the convergence of these two fields in
the policy arena.[2]
With his first book, Mobilizing Nature, Chris Pearson (Univ. of
Liverpool) has made a most valuable contribution to a burgeoning field of study:
"I aim to shed light on the evolving and profoundly historical relationship
between war, militarization, and the environment" (1). More specifically, he
stakes out militarized environments as distinct spaces, with their own ecology,
policy implications, patterns of resource use, social conflicts, and effects on
other landscape.
The book opens with the construction of Camp de Châlons in 1857 and
progresses through a century and a half of peace and war into the twenty-first
century. The author chronicles the conflict between national military and local
civilian priorities, the continuous expansion of the militarized environment,
the place of animals and hunting regulations, use of resources, and the
perceived influences of nature on the physical and mental health of soldiers in
training.
Napoleon III's Camp de Châlons was France's first large, permanent military
base. Its establishment opened a debate between military authorities and
suspicious civilians that echoes still today. Large-scale maneuvers that laid
waste to everything in their path angered Second Empire farmers. So, too, in the
twenty-first century, the effects of erosion, pollution, and waste have upset
local civilian communities. The French people consider militarized landscapes to
be ugly sterilizations of the land and attacks on their local, largely rural,
way of life. To allay such concerns, the French Army claimed it required only
marginal, unproductive lands ill-suited to farming.[3] In the 1950s and 60s, the army moved into the more rugged
hinterlands to train for operations in the harsher terrains of colonial wars.
While this territory was indeed agriculturally unproductive, its great natural
beauty made it attractive for recreational purposes.
After the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), French army camps were charged with
rejuvenating a defeated people by dispensing an invigorating dose of nature to
young male conscripts. Expansion of military bases in 1897, state propaganda
efforts, and showy maneuvers meant to impress the French people with the army's
vitality only raised tensions between the government and a skeptical populace.
In an interesting examination of postcards, Pearson demonstrates that depictions
of army service as a sort of grand manly camping trip were thoroughly
discredited by the actual experiences of the soldiers living in dreary, squalid,
and unhealthy camps. Military facilities played a similar part in efforts to
restore French masculinity and national pride following the Second World War.
But, by that time, such a mission was complicated by imperial wars, the presence
of NATO, and De Gaullist policies.
Never static, the French militarized environment shifted and grew. Camp de
Châlons was overshadowed by late nineteenth-century constructions, which were in
turn superseded in World War I by the massive network of trenches stretching
from the North Sea to the Swiss border. Instead of seeing the trenches as a
"disfigured, transformed, artificial" (91) landscape, as did most
contemporaries, Pearson advises historians to evaluate the experiences of the
soldiers in light of the unique ecological space they inhabited. After the
forest was obliterated, soldiers entrenched to alter the environment to meet an
immediate, pressing need—protection from enemy fire.
The French military expanded into new areas both domestically and globally
after the Great War. At home this was visible in the construction of the Maginot
Line, memorials to the fallen, and battlefield cemeteries. Globally it meant
tighter management of resources in the colonies. This expansion beyond the
borders of France continued during the Second World War, through German
extraction of natural resources, and during the Cold War, through colonial
conflicts and nuclear testing in overseas possessions.
Forestry dominates Pearson's discussion of resource usage. French military
planners cut back or added forests to suit their strategic needs. They were
almost always at loggerheads with civilian foresters about the health of the
land. After all, forests grew irrespective of convenient fields of fire from
fortified pillboxes. Both the Germans and NATO considered the French forests a
valuable resource. Pearson lumps the German occupation with NATO dominance into
a single chapter, "Occupied Territories," on the period 1940–67. Although the
Germans had militarized France in several ways, including building coastal
fortifications and large-scale defensive flooding, they did the worst damage by
aggressively harvesting timber with a total disregard for sustainability.
Some considerable postwar tension between France and its NATO allies stemmed
from disagreements over the emotionally significant Fontainebleau forest. Even
the French exit from NATO did not solve the conflict over the woods. From the
1960s on, an emerging French environmental movement coalesced around resistance
to the militarizing of forests. As Pearson points out, this was not an
expression of Deep Ecology, intended to preserve the trees for nature's sake; it
was an effort to save and protect a pleasant recreation space. Pressure from
civilians in the last thirty years has led the French Army to implement a
recycling program, permit multiple uses of its bases, and provide wildlife,
especially endangered species, with sanctuaries.
Finally, Pearson tracks the role of animals, both wild and domestic, in the
history of French militarization of the environment. Thousands of animals—their
care, shelter, transport, waste, and remains—had an important impact in both
peace and war. The First World War trenches provided a favorable environment for
invasive pests like fleas, lice, and rats, species ubiquitous in the literature
of soldiers on both sides. However, the men were not insensitive to the rare
examples of natural beauty around them: a lone tree, a colorful flower, a stray
songbird might be noticed and cherished more than they would be in
peacetime.

Fond recollections of birdsong pepper veterans' accounts
of trench life as symbols of hope and solace. Against the odds, birds had
adapted to the militarized environment of the Western Front, feeding on the
insects that thrived in the trenches and nesting in remains of trees. Waterfowl
also gathered on water-logged shell holes and starlings mimicked the whistle
blasts used to warn of enemy planes. Birdsong provided reassurance for soldiers
of different nationalities … a reminder that life survived within the brutal
environment of the trenches. (100)

In the 1970s, sheep became a point of controversy when the army sought to
extend Camp Larzac into traditional grazing lands. A national anti-extension
campaign forced the French Army to abandon plans to annex the land. Two decades
later, military authorities argued that their bases served as quasi-nature
preserves that protected endangered birds and butterflies. Hunting[4] regulations were now another bone of
contention. As Pearson observes, before the Revolution the French people had no
right to hunt, which was restricted to aristocrats and royals. Whether German
armies of occupation or the French military itself sought to restrain local
hunting, civilians resented any curtailing of this very symbolic right to
nature.Mobilizing Nature is well written and firmly grounded in both primary
sources and the secondary literature on militarized environments. Pearson does
not compare in any detail the French experience to that of its neighbors.
Strictly speaking, this is beyond the scope of the book, but French military
planners certainly kept an eye on developments across the English Channel. The
building of a central military installation on marginal land followed the
British model of Aldershot. Likewise, packaging military installations as nature
preserves had British precedents.[5]

[1] DoD, "2014 Climate
Change Adaptation Roadmap."[2] See, esp., Richard P. Tucker and Edmund
Russell, eds., Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History
of Warfare (Corvallis: Oregon State U Pr, 2004).[3] This argument played a role in the
creation of the US national parks. See Alfred Runte, National Parks: The
American Experience, 2nd ed. (Lincoln: U Nebraska Pr, 1979).[4] Of mushrooms as well as animals.[5] These matters are touched on without
elaboration on pages 19, 275–76.

About Me

I earned my PhD in 2002 from Lehigh University. I am the author of The Most Defiant Devil: William Temple Hornaday & His Controversial Crusade to Save American Wildlife (University of Virginia Press, 2013) and Chester A. Arthur: The Life of a Gilded Age President and Politician (Nova, 2007).